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A Still and Quiet Conscience: The Archbishop Who Challenged a Pope, a President, and a Church
Through the life of a courageous bishop, an absorbing look at the inner workings of the American Catholic Church, how we got here, and how it could be different.
Pope Francis has spoken of his desire for pastoral bishops-shepherds who have "the smell of the sheep." The story of Raymond G. Hunthausen, archbishop of Seattle from 1975-1991, is about a bishop who epitomized this style-and the price he paid. The quintessential "Vatican II bishop," Hunthausen embraced the spirit of renewal, reaching out to the laity, women, and those on the margins. A courageous witness for peace, he earned national attention when he became the first American bishop to urge tax resistance as a protest against preparations for nuclear war. In doing so, he ran against the Cold War policies of the Reagan Administration. But he also came into conflict with Pope John Paul II's desire to reshape the American episcopacy. This fascinating biography not only recounts a critical turning point for the American Catholic church; it rekindles the vision of a more inclusive, prophetic, and compassionate church as "people of God."
Pope Francis has spoken of his desire for pastoral bishops-shepherds who have "the smell of the sheep." The story of Raymond G. Hunthausen, archbishop of Seattle from 1975-1991, is about a bishop who epitomized this style-and the price he paid. The quintessential "Vatican II bishop," Hunthausen embraced the spirit of renewal, reaching out to the laity, women, and those on the margins. A courageous witness for peace, he earned national attention when he became the first American bishop to urge tax resistance as a protest against preparations for nuclear war. In doing so, he ran against the Cold War policies of the Reagan Administration. But he also came into conflict with Pope John Paul II's desire to reshape the American episcopacy. This fascinating biography not only recounts a critical turning point for the American Catholic church; it rekindles the vision of a more inclusive, prophetic, and compassionate church as "people of God."
- GenresSpiritualityBiography
288 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 16, 2018
This was fascinating. Growing up Catholic in Seattle after all this went down, I'm shocked by how little I knew about Hunthausen or the broader political context it happened in. Most of what I knew was that he existed, had some vague but apparently too extreme liberal/left-leaning sympathies, and was subjected to some Vatican discipline because of them.
Learning the whole story and getting an idea of who he was has been pretty consistently mind-blowing. The book starts with a quick overview of the people and events that turned his conscience toward withholding his taxes to protest Trident subs in the age of mutually assured destruction (What a concept: Catholic political praxis that's more than releasing strongly worded but whiny letters on why asking them to supply contraceptives is egregious persecution). This set off a chain reaction that made it look like the US bishops were going to come out against nuclear deterrence during the Reagan administration before John Paul II made it an impossibility. And it's pretty clear that this, not any criticism of Hunthausen's orthodoxy or practice, was the cause of the multi-year "Apostolic Visitation" that undermined his authority and marked him an eternal pariah in the eyes of the people in the church who mattered.
From there we take a trip back through his youth, early priesthood and bishop days in pre-Vatican II Catholicism. For all the cultural sense I got that he was some flavor of "cafeteria catholic" hippy, his early life is pretty solidly, in fact painfully, Catholic. Like, rigid and hardline if maybe a few hairs more pastoral than his peers, but solidly within the bounds of what a decently orthodox person would be. The author's happy to describe how his natural love of consensus harmonized well with a Vatican II church with more opportunities for democratic involvement in local matters, but outside of asking more uncomfortable questions that clearly came from an honest and practical place, it's hard to see him as much more than another loyal and obedient bishop with some prudential concerns that were perfectly acceptable, at least until John Paul II decided to no longer accept them.
And he definitely did have some positions that would draw the ire of Rome. He advocated dropping celibacy as a requirement for priesthood after watching priests he respected leave ministry for love, and, barring that, to at least allow laicization to be more straightforward and to allow said ex-priests the ability to still minister or teach in some capacity. He and some fellow bishops also wanted more guidelines around how to include women in the Church, and, if women could indeed not be priests, at least some better arguments than the ones they'd heard since they needed to actually talk to people about this. (Spoiler alert: this was mainly solved by releasing reams of paper calling women equal while still tying all power to a priestly office that requires one to be male). And yes, there was a genuine sense in which he was better at pastoral outreach to divorced and remarried Catholics and LGBTQ+ Catholics, but it's hard to point out something that he was doing that was explicitly condemnable by the Catholicism of the day (this was before Ratzinger's "Halloween Letter" on homosexuality). Admittedly, my apostate brain doesn't find intra-church fights particularly interesting or worth arguing these days outside of how they affect people I care about, I can't stress enough that there's no smoking gun of unorthodox behavior from Hunthausen I can see here that singles him in particular out.
But he was indeed singled out. And the Vatican's obsession with secrecy in that process ensured that Hunthausen was given essentially no information about what the Vatican was actually pissed about, no transparency into how it could be resolved, and was essentially just placed in limbo while slow machinery moved behind the scenes. As anyone who's met a human before might be able to tell you, that's a recipe for anxiety and paranoia. And while it might be tempting to place the blame at the feet of a 2000 year old bureaucracy, there's plenty of evidence advanced that those with authority in the matter (up to and including Ratzinger and JP2) knew what they were doing and that the conflicting messages, long periods of uncertainty, and false reassurances that rose to the level of gaslighting were far more likely to be features than bugs of the Visitation process. It seems that Rome viewed obedience as THE terminal virtue in this situation, and any other concerns were batted away as irrelevant or insubordinate. If that sounds short-sighted and cruel, I don't really have any way to tell you it wasn't. And it's cruel in a particularly crazy-making way. Hunthausen clearly felt trapped by the process, and the two bishops the Vatican eventually sent to Seattle to watch over him and sap his authority (Wuerl and Murphy), were clearly trapped in the same system. There are quotes from both showing that they ended up receiving completely different orders than Hunthausen, even after everyone thought they'd been in agreement. Ratzinger comes across incredibly poorly here as the main enforcer of the Vatican's whims, but it's made abundantly and uncomfortably clear that nothing happened without the consent of JP2, if not his explicit command.
There's a lot more I want to talk about. I want to talk about the pro-LGBT Dignity masses that were offered and the piles of emotions that gives me, I want to dive into the political background of why JP2 could not abide Hunthausen standing up to Reagan policies, I want to rage against the fact that Pedophile Cover-up Mastermind Cardinal Law was one of Hunthausen's most bitter enemies among the US bishops, I want to interrogate what this means now that JP2 and Ratzinger/Benedict XVI have left us and Francis has stepped in. But this is already long enough. The short version of this is that Hunthausen presented a very different but still orthodox picture of what the church could be, and was never forgiven for it. This probably won't surprise anyone who's been aware of US politics over the past couple years, but the Church also seems to subscribe to the idea that the extreme Right is to be engaged in dialogue, while anything to their Left is to be destroyed. The Hunthausen situation, and frankly some painful personal experience, tell me that the Church has a powerful anti-charism of discernment when it comes to people challenging them to live orthodox-but-not-inhuman-hardliner lives. Things could have been a lot different. Maybe they will be some day in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. Hunthausen wasn't perfect, and there would have been many, many places where I'd find friction with him if he were in a position of more authority. But I would readily trade the church of today for a church made up of people like him.
Learning the whole story and getting an idea of who he was has been pretty consistently mind-blowing. The book starts with a quick overview of the people and events that turned his conscience toward withholding his taxes to protest Trident subs in the age of mutually assured destruction (What a concept: Catholic political praxis that's more than releasing strongly worded but whiny letters on why asking them to supply contraceptives is egregious persecution). This set off a chain reaction that made it look like the US bishops were going to come out against nuclear deterrence during the Reagan administration before John Paul II made it an impossibility. And it's pretty clear that this, not any criticism of Hunthausen's orthodoxy or practice, was the cause of the multi-year "Apostolic Visitation" that undermined his authority and marked him an eternal pariah in the eyes of the people in the church who mattered.
From there we take a trip back through his youth, early priesthood and bishop days in pre-Vatican II Catholicism. For all the cultural sense I got that he was some flavor of "cafeteria catholic" hippy, his early life is pretty solidly, in fact painfully, Catholic. Like, rigid and hardline if maybe a few hairs more pastoral than his peers, but solidly within the bounds of what a decently orthodox person would be. The author's happy to describe how his natural love of consensus harmonized well with a Vatican II church with more opportunities for democratic involvement in local matters, but outside of asking more uncomfortable questions that clearly came from an honest and practical place, it's hard to see him as much more than another loyal and obedient bishop with some prudential concerns that were perfectly acceptable, at least until John Paul II decided to no longer accept them.
And he definitely did have some positions that would draw the ire of Rome. He advocated dropping celibacy as a requirement for priesthood after watching priests he respected leave ministry for love, and, barring that, to at least allow laicization to be more straightforward and to allow said ex-priests the ability to still minister or teach in some capacity. He and some fellow bishops also wanted more guidelines around how to include women in the Church, and, if women could indeed not be priests, at least some better arguments than the ones they'd heard since they needed to actually talk to people about this. (Spoiler alert: this was mainly solved by releasing reams of paper calling women equal while still tying all power to a priestly office that requires one to be male). And yes, there was a genuine sense in which he was better at pastoral outreach to divorced and remarried Catholics and LGBTQ+ Catholics, but it's hard to point out something that he was doing that was explicitly condemnable by the Catholicism of the day (this was before Ratzinger's "Halloween Letter" on homosexuality). Admittedly, my apostate brain doesn't find intra-church fights particularly interesting or worth arguing these days outside of how they affect people I care about, I can't stress enough that there's no smoking gun of unorthodox behavior from Hunthausen I can see here that singles him in particular out.
But he was indeed singled out. And the Vatican's obsession with secrecy in that process ensured that Hunthausen was given essentially no information about what the Vatican was actually pissed about, no transparency into how it could be resolved, and was essentially just placed in limbo while slow machinery moved behind the scenes. As anyone who's met a human before might be able to tell you, that's a recipe for anxiety and paranoia. And while it might be tempting to place the blame at the feet of a 2000 year old bureaucracy, there's plenty of evidence advanced that those with authority in the matter (up to and including Ratzinger and JP2) knew what they were doing and that the conflicting messages, long periods of uncertainty, and false reassurances that rose to the level of gaslighting were far more likely to be features than bugs of the Visitation process. It seems that Rome viewed obedience as THE terminal virtue in this situation, and any other concerns were batted away as irrelevant or insubordinate. If that sounds short-sighted and cruel, I don't really have any way to tell you it wasn't. And it's cruel in a particularly crazy-making way. Hunthausen clearly felt trapped by the process, and the two bishops the Vatican eventually sent to Seattle to watch over him and sap his authority (Wuerl and Murphy), were clearly trapped in the same system. There are quotes from both showing that they ended up receiving completely different orders than Hunthausen, even after everyone thought they'd been in agreement. Ratzinger comes across incredibly poorly here as the main enforcer of the Vatican's whims, but it's made abundantly and uncomfortably clear that nothing happened without the consent of JP2, if not his explicit command.
There's a lot more I want to talk about. I want to talk about the pro-LGBT Dignity masses that were offered and the piles of emotions that gives me, I want to dive into the political background of why JP2 could not abide Hunthausen standing up to Reagan policies, I want to rage against the fact that Pedophile Cover-up Mastermind Cardinal Law was one of Hunthausen's most bitter enemies among the US bishops, I want to interrogate what this means now that JP2 and Ratzinger/Benedict XVI have left us and Francis has stepped in. But this is already long enough. The short version of this is that Hunthausen presented a very different but still orthodox picture of what the church could be, and was never forgiven for it. This probably won't surprise anyone who's been aware of US politics over the past couple years, but the Church also seems to subscribe to the idea that the extreme Right is to be engaged in dialogue, while anything to their Left is to be destroyed. The Hunthausen situation, and frankly some painful personal experience, tell me that the Church has a powerful anti-charism of discernment when it comes to people challenging them to live orthodox-but-not-inhuman-hardliner lives. Things could have been a lot different. Maybe they will be some day in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. Hunthausen wasn't perfect, and there would have been many, many places where I'd find friction with him if he were in a position of more authority. But I would readily trade the church of today for a church made up of people like him.
February 12, 2016
Well written and insightful. A view into events mostly hidden from the faithful.
July 4, 2016
Finished reading … A Still and Quiet Conscience: the archbishop who challenged a pope, a president, and a church / John A. McCoy … 01 July, 2016
ISBN: 9781626981171
Fantastic book! Yet so sad.
As Archbishop of Seattle (1975-1991), Ray Hunthausen was the sort of bishop who, if there had been more of them, would have seen the Catholic Church flourishing today. No surprise that he was hounded out of his job.
He was a Church man through and through. Loyal to the Church, its Pope and its teachings. But … he was also a Vatican II man, putting the teachings of the Council into practice, including very openly challenging the US government on nuclear arms, particularly through opposition to Trident submarines which were based near his diocese. This did not suit the John Paul II / Ratzinger / Benedict XVI centralist control-freakery or their alliance with the USA. This duo was ably assisted by the vipers nest that is the Roman Curia and a minority of very unchristian Catholics of Seattle and further afield in the US.
This book tells the sorry tale of the treatment of Hunthausen and gives all the gory details of the machinations of the Vatican. Throughout what could only be described as harrowing years that would have destroyed most people, Hunthausen remained gracious and, amazingly, still a church man.
In some ways Hunthausen's experience is echoed in the more recent experience of Bill Morris, Bishop of Toowoomba (1992-2011). Both are Vatican II men and pastoral to the core, but whereas Hunthausen was attacked for years and then chose (if you could really call it that) to retire, Morris was pursued for a shorter period and outright sacked.
However, “A Still and Quiet Conscience” was written by a third party who was on the scene for a lot of the time and he pulls no punches. If Hunthausen had written of his experiences himself, no doubt a lot of detail – the naming and shaming of people and events - would have been missing … as they seem to be in “Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three” (William Martin Morris, ISBN 9781921511417).
Thank God for good people. But sometimes good men can be too nice. So three cheers for John A. McCoy for telling the whole Hunthausen story. Yet another sorry story of the Catholic Church shooting itself in not one but both feet.
Cannot recommend this highly enough.
June 1, 2016
I read this book on the recommendation of my father, who served as a Catholic priest before leaving the institution in 1970 to marry my mother. While this is not usually a topic I want to read in my spare time, it did, as he said it would, give me a glimpse into what his life was like before leaving the active ministry.
The author spent more time on the childhood and early life of Archbishop Hunthausen than interested me, and thus a portion of the book dragged. But I found the interactions between the church and the US administration, especially when it came to our nuclear armament stance, to be quite enlightening. I was also interested in not only the creation and function of the Vatican II Council, but how the church implemented, or failed to implement, the changes agreed upon at the council. This was a critical component of my father's experience as a priest, so it had value to me.
No my favorite book, but I got out of it what I expected. If you are interested in Catholic history of the 70s and 80s, I would recommend this biography as a particular window onto that time period.
The author spent more time on the childhood and early life of Archbishop Hunthausen than interested me, and thus a portion of the book dragged. But I found the interactions between the church and the US administration, especially when it came to our nuclear armament stance, to be quite enlightening. I was also interested in not only the creation and function of the Vatican II Council, but how the church implemented, or failed to implement, the changes agreed upon at the council. This was a critical component of my father's experience as a priest, so it had value to me.
No my favorite book, but I got out of it what I expected. If you are interested in Catholic history of the 70s and 80s, I would recommend this biography as a particular window onto that time period.
Read
February 3, 2016 I have some difficulty with books that have a lot of detail and this book is well researched and has a lot of detail. I am a minister in the protestant church and teach in a Catholic centre here in Calgary and I have lived through this time period. I found it very hopeful and identify with the struggle to bring reform to the church. It was an inspiring read.
September 23, 2015
A Necessary Challenge
This book shy be a call to every Christian to truly live his/her faith every single day of their lives
This book shy be a call to every Christian to truly live his/her faith every single day of their lives
April 6, 2017
The Pacific Northwest Catholic community is still shaped by the holy witness of Archbishop Hunthausen. "He was not a rebel or a dissenter from church teaching." and yet his biography is a profile in courage. I am mulling what the example of this man's life means for me. He shows extraordinary generosity towards those who are, indeed, enemies and for that alone this biography is worth reading. Passages illustrate what it means to be a person of integrity who listens, listens deeply. It is ultimately a book about what it means to be a Catholic. Only occasionally does the author allow his own feelings of outrage to color the prose; otherwise this is the Bishop's story.
"' How do I find out what God wants of me?' he asks. "Discovering God's will for his life became Dutch's biggest challenge" as it is for most of us, but I think the Archbishop approached this question by getting to know Jesus. Here's what he had to say about Jesus: "He never did compromise the truth he came to reveal but neither did he fail to extend to all he encountered the warm and compassionate embrace of a loving God." p.243
"' How do I find out what God wants of me?' he asks. "Discovering God's will for his life became Dutch's biggest challenge" as it is for most of us, but I think the Archbishop approached this question by getting to know Jesus. Here's what he had to say about Jesus: "He never did compromise the truth he came to reveal but neither did he fail to extend to all he encountered the warm and compassionate embrace of a loving God." p.243
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews